As someone who actually saw the Batman movie in the theater in 1966, I feel qualified to weigh in. Perhaps the "discontinuity" concerning Catwoman was justified by her being played by someone who never appeared in the TV series (Lee Meriwether). In any case, Batman doesn't belong in the same category as The Man Called Flintstone (which I also saw the same year), the Munsters movie, etc., because those series had already ended TV production, whereas most Batman TV episodes hadn't yet been produced. It slightly resembles the situation with the first X-Files theatrical movie, which occurred in the midst of the TV series but wasn't necessarily part of its continuity (although I don't care enough to find out for myself). However, Batman the TV series was so explosively popular - and innovative, with its two episodes per week (at first) - that a cheaply produced four-villain movie could be predicted to make back its costs, which I presume it did.
TMP an attempt to revise Star Trek back to 'The Cage' style?
- Thread starter Lance
- Start date
^In fact, the Batman movie was supposed to come out before the series, to serve as a pilot a la Superman and the Mole Men for George Reeves. The thinking was that they could use a feature film budget to build impressive sets and vehicles and create a stock footage library they could recycle in the series. But ABC wanted the series to premiere sooner than the producers planned, so they had to bump up the first season to before the movie, which is why the feature-budget perks like the Batcopter and Batboat didn't debut onscreen until season 2.
So perhaps the reason Batman didn't recognize Catwoman in the movie was because it was written with the assumption that it would come first. Although for what it's worth, Catwoman only appeared once in season 1 and I don't think Batman saw her unmasked there.
So perhaps the reason Batman didn't recognize Catwoman in the movie was because it was written with the assumption that it would come first. Although for what it's worth, Catwoman only appeared once in season 1 and I don't think Batman saw her unmasked there.
Probably, but as far as I can tell from Dozier's paperwork, none of the film's talents--Dozier, Lorenzo Semple, jr., or others ever said (in 1966) that the movie was independent of the series. Moreover, its common knowledge that a Batman movie had been planed before ABC rushed Greenway into producing a weekly series, but that idea was not fleshed out in 1965 (the year the Batman pilot went into production). In any case, by the time Dozier was attempting to ride the wave of season one's success with the idea of producing a film and knowing how wildly popular Julie Newmar had been as Catwoman (he did want her for the film), it would have been easy to just toss a line in Semple's revised script noting that she had survived the fall from the TV episode no matter who ended up in the role.
In 1966, unless 20th Century Fox and/or Greenway spelled out the film being in its own continuity, its easy to assume audiences thought the film was yet another adventure in the overall Batman production, hence the problem when continuity-challenged Dozier & Howie Horwitz--after getting Newmar back in the role--tied her next appearance only to the 1st season episode, and not the movie.
It was not until 1970, when Dan Curtis was clear in period interviews that House of Dark Shadows was not a part of the soap opera continuity that a hard, definitive line was drawn about spin-offs.
Interesting point.
Actually, the movie was a box office disappointment, earning only an estimated 1.7 million from an production budget of 1.5 million. In the wake of the film's underperformance, Greenway/Lawn producer William Dozier had said (in so many words) "why pay for something you can get for free at home?" which was his only bit of wisdom in his milking of the Batman phenomenon.
Last edited:
Just to interject on this, it's worth noting that Batman and Superman, were comic long before they were television series (or films thereof).
I'll grant Dragnet, Munsters Go Home, etc. are more solid examples of a film being made from an existing t.v. show. Though IIRC those were basically still on the air when the films came out to try and directly monetize some profit with a little paying public.
Whereas TPM was basically resurrecting a canceled show from nearly a decade earlier (albeit one with a massive cult following as evidence by the brith and growth of the conventions, etc. in the early 70s).
Superman made it to the big screen 3 years after the first comic.
Batman hit the big screen in 1943, about 4 years after its comic. They were both extremely hot properties at the time.
And was also hugely popular on radio throughout the 1940s. The radio series was a major hit and was very influential on the comics, introducing Perry White, Jimmy Olsen, Inspector Henderson, and kryptonite, as well as creating the famous opening narration and catchphrases like "This looks like a job for Superman" and "Up, up, and away!" It also featured Batman & Robin as frequent guest stars and thus had the first superhero crossovers many years before it ever happened in the comics. (The covers of World's Finest Comics frequently showed Superman, Batman, and Robin doing things together, but their stories inside remained completely separate.)
I Know this has been said before, but TOS movies repeated history with the television series. TMP, The Cage-like film that spent way too much money on itself and got too cerebral, BUT ... it provided for the sets that would be used in the series, forever after. TOS kept being threatened with cancellation, as did the films. The last TOS episode cast Kirk in and unfavourable light, as did TUC. But to the question of was TMP an attempt to revise STAR TREK back to the style of The Cage? The answer is a resounding "yes," as far as I can tell. And just like after The Cage was presented to the studios, TMP ended up being rebooted in the sequel in a style more in keeping with a swashbuckling spirit. It's something how History "repeated" itself very accidentally in this franchise. I'm not sure that such an odd coincidence could happen with it, again. Interesting, though ... very interesting.
Intriguing thoughts.
The thing that launched off my creating this thread was a feeling that in a great many ways, "The Cage" is Star Trek as Roddenberry intended it to be before the reality of commerical interests made compromises necessary. And when presented with the chance to 'restart' Star Trek, both with The Motion Picture and with The Next Generation, both times Roddenberry more or less leaned back on "The Cage" as a blueprint. It feels to me like GR wasn't always entirely happy with the way TOS developed following the second pilot episode, and was (either consciously or unconsciously) attempting to steer the franchise back to his ideal vision. And again, as you said history repeated with the movies, and again Roddenberry revised it back to something closer to "The Cage" with The Next Generation. Retrospectively, "The Cage" doesn't feel a lot like TOS, but it does in a lot of ways feel like a prototypical version of Next Gen....
I'm not sure what you mean by that. The changes made between "The Cage" and TOS were largely matters of quality rather than commercial compromise. The characters were largely the same -- first-season Kirk was just Pike with a name change, McCoy was just Boyce with a name change, and Spock absorbed Number One's personality traits -- but they got more effective actors to play them. And in "The Cage," Roddenberry failed to deliver on his promise of a multiethnic cast, so it was at the network's insistence that the "change" of adding Sulu and Uhura was made. Plus it was Roddenberry's own decision to drop Number One altogether, rather than recasting her with a stronger actress like Lee Meriwether or Jeanne Bal as the network wanted, because it let him claim that the network was opposed to a female first officer rather than admit that they just didn't like him casting his mistress in the role. None of that is about "commercial interests," beyond the general principle that making a better show and appealing to diverse audiences will improve the chances of success. So I'm not sure what changes you're talking about.
"As Roddenberry intended" is not the perfect, superior thing that fan mythology would have it. A lot of what made Trek work came from people other than Roddenberry, people who improved on his ideas or pushed him to improve them. Yes, compromise is a part of the creative process, but so is collaboration. Other people's input can improve your work, and it's a poor creator who doesn't acknowledge that.
It's odd that you'd restate that belief when it's already been pretty thoroughly debunked in this thread. The "Cage"-like stylistic elements in TMP were more the result of Robert Wise's input, his preference for a cool, sterile future in the vein of The Andromeda Strain, than Roddenberry's. We've covered this already.
And I don't see anything particularly "Cage"-like in TNG beyond the resurrection of the "Number One" epithet for the first officer. TNG was basically a reworking of Phase II, with mature Kirk becoming Picard, Decker and Ilia becoming Riker and Troi, and Xon (crossed with Questor) becoming Data. Otherwise, the ideas Roddenberry contributed to TNG were shaped by his perception of himself as a visionary futurist, his desire to promote his utopian philosophy of a "Technology Unchained" future where humanity had acheived perfection and enlightenment and people lived solely to better themselves. That perception of himself as a philosopher rather than just a working producer was a belief he didn't develop until the '70s, when fandom started to see him that way and he bought into the ego-pleasing hype. The Roddenberry who created "The Cage" was just trying to make a successful TV show, albeit a smarter one than the norm for TV science fiction of the era.
Beyond that, TNG was largely the creation of David Gerrold and D.C. Fontana, with input from Bob Justman. Gerrold wrote the series bible and Fontana wrote the bulk of the pilot script, which means, by Writers' Guild rules, that they both should've gotten co-creator credit for TNG. Roddenberry fought tooth and nail to deny them their rightful credit by convincing the Writers' Guild that TNG was just a continuation of TOS. But they probably did more of the work of creating the show than he did. By that time, due to his advancing illness and drug addiction, he was barely even capable of functioning as a producer, and he had to be phased out to a figurehead role by the late first season.
The idea that your "ideal vision" is what you started with and any change from it is for the worse is getting it completely backward. Any writer who thinks that way is an egomaniacal moron who's unlikely to produce any worthwhile work. The earliest form of your idea is usually its worst version, because you haven't yet done the work to bring out its full potential and fix its problems. Creation is the result of a whole process of trial and error and refinement. There is no muse that drops a perfect, complete idea into your head at the start; what you begin with is rough and unformed and you have to work hard to make it better.
I think I read a while back that Roddenberry began considering the idea that became Star Trek as early as 1960. It took him four years of working on the premise to develop it into something good enough to sell to a network. So obviously the need to keep working and improving wouldn't just stop there. No creation is ever perfect. There's always room to improve it. The goal of creativity is to move forward to better ideas, to learn from experience and improve on your past work, not to cling fanatically to your unchanged ideas from the past. If you can't come up with anything better today than you were able to think of 25 years earlier, then you're in the wrong business.
Thank you for pointing out these myths that have no basis in fact. NBC was the one really pushing for diverse casting, not Roddenberry. And there are memos out there that prove it.
If anyone here hasn't read Inside Star Trek: The Real Story by Robert Justman and Herb Solow, you should. It'll open your eyes about a lot of "facts" concerned with Star Trek.
And that false modesty of referring to himself in interviews as a "Philosopher, Second Class"...
"...You wanna know what my vision is? Dollar signs! Money! I didn't build this ship to usher in a new era for humanity. You think I wanna see the stars? I don't even like to fly! I take trains! I built this ship so I could retire to some tropical island filled with naked women. THAT'S Zefram Cochrane. THAT'S his vision. This other guy you keep talking about, this historical figure? I never met him. I can't imagine I ever will."
^^ That's a helluva lot closer to Roddenberry's real-life philosophy than most of what we got in the shows.
I find this statement really funny in light of this...
So I guess when you're recycling your own ideas from just 15-20 years earlier, it's okay?
WGA rules about "Created by" credit are not etched in stone, especially where sequels are spinoffs are concerned. Roddenberry previously "Created by"ed Star Trek and the TNG premise, and Gerrold's contributions would likely have been seen as tweaks and refinements to an established concept rather than a whole new creation. The opening narration makes clear it's the same old format but the crew members are different, as is some of the tech and procedures (which would be seen as window dressing) and that's insufficient to get Created by credit. Gerrold's suit was likely more about getting money than the credit he was unlikely to get. I'd guess Paramount settled with him (and Fontana) in part to just get rid of potential bad publicity.
That doesn't track with how any of the other Trek shows assigned creator credits, or how most shows do it in general. Heck, these days, even shows directly adapted from comic books or novels usually give the creator credit to the TV writers who adapt them rather than the original authors/artists. Most commonly, the creator credits and the writing credits for the pilot episode are one and the same. So Fontana not getting co-creator credit for TNG was an exception to the general rule.
Read Gerrold's 1973 book The World of Star Trek, where he talks in the final section about how he thinks the show could've been improved. A number of the ideas he suggested then ended up in TNG 14 years later, like having the captain stay on the bridge while others went on dangerous missions. He also introduced transporter-based food synthesizers (i.e. replicators) in his 1981 Bantam Trek novel The Galactic Whirlpool, which also contains a reference to a Captain La Forge, named for a prominent disabled fan named George La Forge. It's clear that there's a lot of Gerrold's creative DNA in TNG from the get-go.
Besides, why would he have been "unlikely to get" credit? He did do the bulk of the writing on the series bible. That's a known fact, and by WGA rules, that made him eligible for co-creator credit (though you're right that it didn't guarantee it as I implied before). The only reason I can think of why it would've been unlikely was because of homophobia in the industry, and if that was the reason, it's hardly something to be defended.
X-Files Fight the future is one hundred percent a chunk of the continuity, particularly at the time, and fed back into the production when it returned after the summer.
It's not that others didn't contribute, it's that there's a tone established from the top down. Gene wanted something serious for TMP and there was buy-in from Paramount and the choice of Robert Wise was in-keeping with that intent (go watch The Andromeda Strain for an example of another Robert Wise film with a similar no-nonsense problem-solving style). With that foundation set you weren't going to get a lot of light-hearted moments. So ultimately the finished product reflects the vision Gene had, aka The Cage 2.0.
When Paramount blamed the humorlous and cerebral tone of TMP for not meeting expectations it shifted Gene off to the side. From that point onward he started complaining about things that he couldn't stop, like the overtly military flourishes of Meyer's take on Trek.
When Paramount blamed the humorlous and cerebral tone of TMP for not meeting expectations it shifted Gene off to the side. From that point onward he started complaining about things that he couldn't stop, like the overtly military flourishes of Meyer's take on Trek.
There's a logical leap in that paragraph I don't follow at all. How do you get from "something serious" to "The Cage"? It's not as if that was the only serious episode in the series.
Christopher, but the later shows were much more spin-offs with different premises and (obviously) no involvement from the original creator, hence they are "based on", whereas TNG not only nominally had Roddenberry in the driver's seat but is basically Star Trek with different characters and some tweaked assignments.
Roseanne doesn't have a "Created by" credit on her shows despite her character being based on her "domestic goddess" standup act, this because she did not materially contribute to the writing of the pilot. Show bibles/writers guides are slipperier because not every show has one. This why I think Gerrold would not necessarily have been on as firm footing as one might think, and possibly/likely why he settled.
Speaking of next generations, the writing credits for 1988's Bonanza The Next Generation opening credits contain this:
Teleplay by
Paul Savage
Story by
David Dortort
Based on "Bonanza" Created by
David Dortort
...and no separate "Created by" credit.
I don't know all the particulars of the development of this, so it isn't necessarily a 1:1 match, but as the show—like STTNG—doesn't feature any of the original characters, it does illustrate that writing the teleplay for the pilot (in this case the show wasn't picked up) doesn't necessarily get one into vaunted "Created by" strata.
It does make me curious, though, if any WGA-signatory production spinoff which included the active participation of the original creator has ever extended "Created by" credit to include people who did work on the order of Fontana and Gerrold.
All of this is why I say the rules are "not so hard and fast" and why the WGA arbitrates these matters, because there are always exceptions and edge cases in a business which is so often collaborative. Since this matter never went through WGA arbitration (EDIT: I should have said Gerrold settled) we'll never know how it would have landed. My guess, based on everything I know about the WGA, is that Gerrold was unlikely to get the credit he was asking for. Your opinion may differ.
Roseanne doesn't have a "Created by" credit on her shows despite her character being based on her "domestic goddess" standup act, this because she did not materially contribute to the writing of the pilot. Show bibles/writers guides are slipperier because not every show has one. This why I think Gerrold would not necessarily have been on as firm footing as one might think, and possibly/likely why he settled.
Speaking of next generations, the writing credits for 1988's Bonanza The Next Generation opening credits contain this:
Teleplay by
Paul Savage
Story by
David Dortort
Based on "Bonanza" Created by
David Dortort
I don't know all the particulars of the development of this, so it isn't necessarily a 1:1 match, but as the show—like STTNG—doesn't feature any of the original characters, it does illustrate that writing the teleplay for the pilot (in this case the show wasn't picked up) doesn't necessarily get one into vaunted "Created by" strata.
It does make me curious, though, if any WGA-signatory production spinoff which included the active participation of the original creator has ever extended "Created by" credit to include people who did work on the order of Fontana and Gerrold.
All of this is why I say the rules are "not so hard and fast" and why the WGA arbitrates these matters, because there are always exceptions and edge cases in a business which is so often collaborative. Since this matter never went through WGA arbitration (EDIT: I should have said Gerrold settled) we'll never know how it would have landed. My guess, based on everything I know about the WGA, is that Gerrold was unlikely to get the credit he was asking for. Your opinion may differ.
Last edited:
But D.C. Fontana did write the majority of TNG's pilot -- heck, she originally wrote all of it, then Roddenberry tacked on his Q subplot when it was expanded from 90 minutes to 2 hours -- yet she was also denied creator credit. How do you explain that?
Wasn't Bob Wise a very late addition even to the motion picture? My recollection is that for a while, Robert Collins was migrated over even after the project became a theatrical movie and not a pilot for TV, and was paid for his services even though they ultimately chose not to move ahead with him at the helm.
She was assigned the job for writing the pilot from the pool of writers Gene had on staff at the time, but didn't create the series' premise.
Similar threads
